“We should’ve brought her up here,” Gwen said. “I hate that urn. I hate trading her back and forth like she’s a goddamn set of silver. What was Tom thinking, what was she thinking?”
“I never want it,” said Libby. “Tom just shows up with it, and—what am I supposed to say? I feel like it makes my house smell of smoke. But Tom’s just doing what she wanted; it’s not his fault.” Libby, the soother of rough edges. She must do this all day, Danny thought, smoothing ruffled heads when moms and dads leave. She has left them. He heaved a stuttering sigh.
“I’m sure she loved the idea of being able to keep an eye on us,” continued Libby, “but now we get to decide who sleeps where. Now we’re the grown-ups.”
“She probably just wanted to give us more time,” Gwen said, quieter now, able to look at Danny again, fully back from wherever she had gone. “To wait ’til we were ready to scatter her. I think we all need more time.”
But Danny knew why Scarlet had wanted the urn, the cozy place on the mantel, rather than swirling under all that ocean. You can move an urn; you can’t move the sea. You can’t take it with you when you go.
“I need to give you guys something,” Danny said. “I’ll be right back.” He went up to his room, went into his closet, and found what he was looking for. He came back out to the porch holding a package wrapped in newspaper and twine. A tight triangle like a folded flag. He sat down in a wicker chair, the package in his lap. His sisters stood in front of him, their shadows cast across his hands. The string untied, he unfolded the paper, letting the package unravel slowly in his lap. And in the center of the open newspaper, next to the headline “Glacier Shrinks” and “Death Toll Passes 500—City is Surrounded,” was Gwen’s gun. More accurately, Scarlet’s gun.
Danny had kept it in the bottom of his sleeping bag, but afraid of possibly blowing off his own foot, moved it to the back of his closet, behind a box of mothballs and a pile of tattered pillowcases. After killing the deer, Gwen had put it in his hand, the barrel still so hot it had burned his palm, left a blister. She’d handed it to him as if it were an apple core she wanted him to drop in the trash.
It had given him a profound sense of relief, sitting in the back of his closet waiting for him. Some days he’d just pat the closet door, knowing through it was an escape, a key, a ticket out.
“Jesus Christ,” whispered Libby. Danny looked up at them. Gwen was biting on her lips.
“I don’t want this anymore,” Danny said.
Libby bent over and pulled Danny’s head to her, practically climbed into his lap. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
He nodded at her. His tears were back, though softer this time; he could breathe through them now.
Gwen took the gun from his lap and stomped down the porch steps. Libby and Danny went to the rail and watched her stride down the path, dumping the bullets from the cylinder into her hand. She went past Melissa and Tom without pausing, and down the ramp, stopping only at the very edge of the float. She stood, looking out as if she was about to dive in, to swim to town, to boil the sea with her rage. And then she hurled the gun out in an arc like a boomerang, and sprinkled the bullets into the waves at her feet as if feeding the fish with lead. Danny thought of the gun at the bottom of the harbor, of giving the lobsters a fighting chance, of arming the Crustacean Revolution. He would tell Gwen that when she came back to the porch; she’d like that.
TWENTY-SIX
GWEN
July 12
Gwen was drawing on the south porch, overlooking the small cove that led to the Shaws’. The cove had a spit of low sea grass at its center and a stand of pine jutted a rocky foot toward the open channel. It was certainly picturesque. Too much so, really. The type of landscape popularized by so much diner or motel art. But not the typical washed-out pastels of southern beaches, beaches as far north as, say, Cape Cod; not here. These were primal colors, colors that ran in the blood of lobstermen. Color she had been avoiding. Washed-out watercolor was the most she could manage. She didn’t want to be so committed to the paper.
Make it. Don’t define it, or interpret it, or line it up against older work to assess how you’re progressing. No. Just make it. Gwen took a slim tin of Cray-Pas out of a canvas bag that bloomed with charcoal smudges. She rolled one between her fingers, drew bright lines on the edge of her paper.
She used pencil first, but almost right away the color too, and then carved the pencil back in on it, seeing the indent of the line. She worked slowly, and sank deeper into the image, into the looking, the seeing. Soon she saw only what was there, not what she knew or remembered. Her knuckles occasionally locked under the intensity of her grip. Tom came around the corner, stood under the stone arch and then sat down on the railing, watching her work.
“I like what you’re doing,” said Tom.
“Thanks,” she said, as surprised by the comment as she was by his presence in this quiet moment. Tom shifted on the porch railing, facing the house, his back to the water. She could feel his unease, like a wobbly chair, there was no balance, no solidity. She wanted to slide a cardboard coaster under one of his feet.
“How are things going?” He motioned to the drawing. “With everything?” Tom owned one of her drawings, a portrait of Libby reading the paper at her kitchen table. He’d bought it through the gallery; Gwen hadn’t even known he was the buyer until she saw it hanging in his study.
“Things are good. I had some decent traffic at my last open studio, some interest. Celeste keeps telling me I need to work larger, and in paint. She’s tired of my black-and-white shows. She says, work big, make us both money.”
She knew his asking about her work was his go-to procrastination technique. He had done something similar when the three of them told Danny their mother was dying.
She kept drawing, waiting; he’d get there eventually. Like waiting for a snail. As kids she and Libby would pull snails from the rocks at low tide, hold a small, knotted shell on their palms, staying still until the slick trapdoor opened and the snail slid out. Gwen had always felt sorry for them, having to carry their houses on their backs. How tired they must be.
“Keeping it is just not realistic, Gwen,” he finally said.
She put a hand to her belly, surprised, offended, but then she followed his gaze as he looked at the roof, the stone arch, the sagging gate leading out into the meadow.
She rolled her eyes at the cove. He can’t let this be. She turned to him, rubbed hair out of her eyes with a bent wrist, fingers already sticky and green.
“Tom, I don’t think anyone, besides you, is ready to make this decision. You gotta back off.”
“It may not be a question of readiness. It may be a question of necessity,” said Tom. “Think how much that roof will cost to replace. A whole new shingle roof, maybe seventy thousand dollars.”